Poiesis

If what is or is not an ethical truth is contingent on the types of biological organisms that we are, then changing the types of biological organisms that we are will change the nature of what is or is not ethical.

So writes Greg Nirshberg in a reflection titled Genetic Modification and Human Ontology. This is probably useful as far as it goes.

One of the matters scarcely explored, however, is that significant modifications to the human genome and associated systems, will, if undertaken at all, be undertaken in the context of changes in even larger the systems in which they are embedded. [1] To (mis?)use the language suggested by Andrew Pickering, there will be a 'dance of agency' between (on the one hand) scientists and society and (on the other) the world as revealed through performance. Agency -- and therefore ethics -- will be an emergent property of interaction between the two.

But even if we are necessarily ignorant of many of ethical (and spiritual) questions that will confront us or our descendants can we not still develop working hypotheses (or ideas to explore in performance rather than cognition)?  So, for example, we may consider this from James Lovelock, (echoing Lewis Thomas here):

The remaining life span of the biosphere is unlikely to be much more than 500 million years, so that if humans died out the chances of our replacement by another intelligent communicating species is improbable. If this is true then we have a goal a purpose. As part of the Earth system our job is to help keep our planet habitable and perhaps become a step in the evolution of an intelligent planet.

One small but essential way of pursuing such a goal would be the tending of forests and other ecosystems through interaction and learning over time: techniques of ecological restoration/recreation/new-creation that are 'alive to emergence.'

Footnote:

[1] See also level 3 systems complexity as described by Brad Allenby and Dan Sarowitz in The Techno-human Condition, plus their short posts here.

(Image from Solaris - Lem/Tarkovsky)

P.S. 9 Feb: 'You...have to consider the possibility that cognitive enhancements may go hand in hand with moral enhancements.'

Led by the nose

Then I have a more outlandish thought. Does the gorse smell me, and know there is a living thing near it? Is it directing its fragrant come-ons my way? This was an outrageously egocentric notion but not out of the question. Natural smells are not just random chemical emissions, they're part of a complex messaging system between plant and plant, animal and plant. Rats emit an airborne chemical signal, a pheromone, when they're afraid which turns on a natural analgesic in other rats in the vicinity to prepare them for pain. When oak leaves are seriously munched by insects they too emit a pheromone which promotes the production of extra tannin in neighbouring trees which makes their leaves more bitter to marauders. Mopane trees in Africa, a favourite food of elephants, do the same and send out messages to other trees when they're being browsed. The elephants are wise to this trick. They eat only a few leaves from each tree and move upwind to new trees. "We can't hear the trees calling to each other," wrote the science writer Colin Tudge, "but the air is abuzz with their consersations nonetheless, conducted in vaporous chemistry."

-- Richard Mabey in The Stinkhorn and the Perfumier, the third of his essays series The Scientist and the Romantic. The reason we know so much about scents we cannot ourselves smell, he explains, is thanks to the electron capture detector invented by James Lovelock in the 1960s:

It's been this instrument which has revealed that fruit flies will respond to as little as one hundred millionth of a gram of a pheromone produced by cassia plants, that lima beans affected by spider mite give off a volatile chemical in minute concentrations that attracts another species of predatory mite that feeds on the original mites. It's helped untangle the extraordinary life cycle of the Large Blue butterfly...

The electron capture detection has also helped us understand the plight of "that gravely threatened creature, the bee":

Honey bees are able to read and interpret chemical cues diffused into the atmosphere over a range forty square kilometres and convey the information back to other bees to their colony. But we now know that the residues of exhaust from cars using lead free petrol react with the odour molecules from flowers, making them indecipherable to bees. This may be one of the causes of the now widespread problem of hive collapse.

Earlier in the essay Mabey discusses scent and memory in his own life, how it unlocks his own "vast structure of recollection" (Proust), not least the associations of various flowers and woodland smells throughout the year. "The puzzle", says Mabey, "is why we're so good at scents despite their having little relevance to our survival and why they're linked to emotion. Scents unlock memories I sometimes didn't know I had":

Smell isn't the oldest sense. The earliest cells must have first acquired an ability to orient themselves in space and respond to warmth, But the identification of food and the necessity of interacting with other organisms entailed the development of this chemical messaging system and we've inherited it. Long before we began to register sense consciously our behaviour was being guided by them. They helped us in finding a mate and bonding with children and tribe, with locating food and avoiding danger, with interpreting the weather and the comings and goings of other creatures. The smell receptors were the foundations of the limbic system, a primitive centre concerned with basic emotions and the recording of sensation, and it was round this that the apparatus of memory began to evolve. Our brains are outgrowth of our noses. No wonder that smells remain the great carriers and triggers of potent memories. They're both processed in the same ancient areas of our brains.

Lewis Thomas had a vision of an entire planet regulated by its smells:

In this immense organism, chemical signs might serve the function of global hormones, keeping balance and symmetry in the operation of various interrelated working parts, informing tissues in the vegatation of the Alps about the state of eels in the Sargasso Sea by long interminable relays on interconnected messages between all kinds of other creatures.

Touching the world ocean

The sea is largely blue (empty of life) rather than green (full of plants and algae) for several reasons. [1] It has, however, a jelly-like 'skin', a sea-surface microlayer about a hundredth of an inch (0.254mm) thick that contains a 'menagerie of microbes'. As Carl Zimmer reports:

It may be hard to imagine such a fine coat of slime holding together for long on top of the heaving ocean. But Dr. [Oliver] Wurl has found that it is quite durable. “We have collected microlayer samples with wind conditions of 16 to 18 knots,” he said. “It’s not pleasant to be in a small boat at that wind speed. That tells us the microlayer is pretty stable.”

At this microlayer, gases are pulled down from the atmosphere. "It’s the ocean breathing through its skin," says Michael Cunliffe. Zimmer continues:

The 'skin' may play a critical role in the environmental well-being of the planet. Studies have shown that pollutants like pesticides and flame retardants can be trapped in the microlayer.

Footnote

[1] Thomas Sherratt and David Wilkinson summarise an answer in Big Questions in Ecology and Evolution like this:

Much of the world's seawater is too dark for photosynthesis. In the euphotic zone, where there is enough light to support a green sea, other factors come into play. Large 'rooted' plants and macroalgae can only survive in the very small area of the ocean that is shallow enough for them to have access to light while being attached to the seabed, and large plants cannot survive by a floating way of life in most of the ocean, because they will be washed up by wind and currents. The leaves the question of why phytoplankton do not make most of the ocean green? The answer is that most seawater is too low in nutrients needed for their growth; one of the reasons for this impoverishment is the action of the plankton themselves through the biological pump. Physical processes, such as thermal stratification, are also important in maintaining low nutrients in the euphotic zone and may change with alterations to the Earth's climate.

Sherratt and Wilkinson note Alfred Redfield's realisation in the 1930s that ocean organisms themselves are largely responsible for creating the chemical environment in which they live rather than it being merely the background against which they evolve. James Lovelock has described Redfield as a forerunner to Gaia theory.

P.S. 29 July: a mechanism is proposed for "how some of the ocean's tiniest swimming animals can have a huge impact on large-scale ocean mixing."

Deep history of life, and its future

Yesterday I listened to talks at the Geological Society by Lynn Margulis and Martin Brasier under the joint title Deep History of Life on Earth. Among take-home points, Margulis outlined what she described as five extensions of Gaia theory as of 2009:

1. Redistribution of elements

2. Salt: redistribution and retardation of its dissolution

3. Augmentation of solid, liquid and gas interfaces

4. Water retention and distribution on a planetary scale

5. Production of granite (a mineral found nowhere else in the solar system, comprising 0.4% of the Earth lithosphere) [1]

I asked Prof. Margulis if she had anything to say about Peter Ward's Medea hypothesis. She did not. Crispin Tickell, chairing, said it did not, in fact, contradict Gaia. [2]

Martin Brasier outlined key points from his book Darwin's Lost World, including the idea that the development of an anus (a through-gut and the capacity to digest in new ways) was a fundamental (my bad pun, not his) innovation enabling the Cambrian explosion.

He said his hunch was that the perturbations in the Earth system consequent upon human activities were so great that 'we could be on the cusp of a Cambrian-like transformation' of life on Earth (bigger than, say, the K-T) though whether it would be a 'new Cambrian explosion' or a 'return pre-Cambrian conditions' he was not, when I asked him, inclined to speculate.

Where the dust blows through these heights there once shone a silent sea. [3]

Footnotes

[1] Margulis spells out these questions and others more fully in a contribution to Scientists on Gaia (2004). See comment attached at the foot of this post.

[2] It seems to me, though, that there may be something to be said for Tyler Volk's view that 'Gaia is life in a wasteworld of byproducts' (dubbed 'Garbage Can Gaia' by Ward), and Prof. Basier hinted as much.

[3] The image is Suilven, an inselberg of Torridonian sandstone on top of Lewisian gneiss. The quote is from Cold Mountain. Brasier imagines Charles Lyell sketching three riddles after a walking on Quinag:

1. A mountain that stood on its head.
2. An ocean that disappeared.
3. A rock that swallowed time.

P.S. 8 July: The continents 'were green' in the Neoproterozoic, according to a Letter to Nature from L. Paul Knauth & Martin J. Kennedy. See also Dawn of the animals: Solving Darwin's dilemma.

Loss and freedom

James Lovelock has an unsentimental view of nature. [1] "Gaia", as Lynn Margulis put it, "is one tough bitch". Yet he too mourns what is being lost (see previous post). Another view comes from N J Collar [2]:

The diminishment of nature is the diminishment of man. Extinction is the negation of the possible; it creates poverty in the mind. Our capacity to experience, to imagine, to contemplate, erodes with the erosion of nature, and with it we forfeit piecemeal — landscape by landscape, site by site, species by species — the freedom of mind which yet we cherish as ultimately the greatest feature of our human identity. This is not to say that we should never seek to provide justifications for conservation based on precise, measurable benefits to mankind at whatever scale. It is, however, to say that we should also and primarily have the courage and honesty to assert that the reason biodiversity matters is because it confers on us an imprecise, unmeasurable and immeasurable well-being that is located in the spirit rather than in the wallet.

One of the ways to think about the significance of human impacts on the biosphere, then, may be in terms of the blowback on human capabilities.

Footnotes

[1] In his most recent book Lovelock repeats that, in his view, 'nature' will be fine in the long run. We should, rather, worry about saving ourselves.

[2] Beyond value: biodiversity and the freedom of the mind (2003). Thanks to Tom Bailey for reminding me of this.

Seeing

Consider the Mantis shrimp, or Stomatopod, which has the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom, with hyperspectral colour vision allowing up to 12 colour (or perhaps 16) channels extending into ultraviolet, advanced depth perception, and an extensive ability to see polarized light. Intriguingly, these animals have little in the way of brains as we think of them.


Consider, too, a kind of seeing known only by Man: the Earth from space. James Lovelock, the man who imagined Gaia, writes:

The icon is undergoing a subtle change as the white ice fades away, the green of forests and grasslands fades into the dun of desert, and oceans loose their blue-green hue and turn a purer, swimming-pool shade of blue as they too become desert. [1]

Footnote

[1] The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009). But surely the book is mis-titled; the face of Gaia is changing, not vanishing.